Disclaimer: I don't own anything that anyone recognizes, and if you think that I do, well, um, yeah... maybe you should get that checked out...
Jar of Hearts
Chapter Four
I've seen scenes like this one before, whether it be in movies or in real life. A group of four girls, oh so shiny with their glimmering braces that just glint in the florescent light, their make up sparkling with the glitter that most girls like to cover up with.
Their laughing and whispering, and while that could mean several things I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that it doesn't mean anything good. They glance at me as I walk into the bathroom, and the brunette looks at the blonde who just shrugs and keeps going.
They don't care that I might have to be the one who cleans up their mess in the bathroom. They don't care about much at all, other than keeping their reputations and their looks and the boys that whisper to them on top of the mattress.
I walk into the bathroom and brace myself. I'm almost expecting a batch of fresh blood to be spattered throughout the floor and a heart strewn against the walls.
Fact of Life: The worst pain isn't always physical.
Instead I hear sobbing from inside one of the stalls. If I was a better person this might have made me feel horrible.
If I was a different person I probably would knock on the door and ask her what's wrong and what happened and the ever lovely what can I do to help. Instead I go to the mirror and get out a tube of mascara and start fixing my make-up, the whole reason that I came in here to begin with. Believe me, I don't go around looking for innocent girls to save.
Fact of Life: I'm not the hero type. Never have been and never will be.
Defending the innocent and protecting the weak? Yeah, not really my thing. I would be more likely to run away and save myself than to risk my own skin for somebody else.
I know the type of broken that this girl, whoever she turns out to be, is and I know that all of the kind words in the world won't help. These kinds of wounds have to be left alone to be able to scab and then to scar, an ugly but successful way of healing.
I don't make a sound as I hear the door squeak open. This girl looks surprised to see me in here, and mascara makes its way down her cheek like a particularly ugly tear. She sniffs and I don't bother to offer the words that I know will mostly likely make her feel worse before they get better. I don't ask if she's okay, because I know she's not.
She looks to be about fourteen and like she is trying too hard. Her shirt is too low cut for her to wear considering that she has no boobs to speak of, and her mouth is too wide and her nose is too pointed for traditional beauty.
For a moment I ponder about what she could have possibly done, but then I remember that you don't necessarily have to do anything to get people to hate you, and that I also just don't care.
Silently I hand her a packet of those mini tissues that I kept in my backpack and an almost empty tube of mascara that I haven't thrown away yet simply because I'm a pack rat and can't bear to sentence anything to a landfill.
Fact of Life: Sometimes the simplest things can create empires.
..O..
"You have that new boy in your next class, right?" Kole asked, dragging her brightly painted fingernail across the peeling paint of the table that we always sat at before fourth period.
"Garth," I finally said, still not entirely sure what possessed me to admit that I knew his name. "His name is Garth, and yes, if you must know, he is in my next class."
"Lucky you," Kole cooed, conveniently forgetting my reaction towards him last Friday or the aftermath of it. "He's cute."
No. Not lucky me.
"As cute as Joey Wilson?" I deflected the spotlight away from Garth and onto Kole's very obvious crush. This morning she had found some excuse to talk to him, and the look on her face was so gooey and sweet that it made me sick. I wondered if Nark had seen them together. Even I had to admit that they looked cute together, from a distance.
The blood rushed up to Kole's cheeks, staining them that brilliant pink color that they always got when Joey was mentioned. She's lucky that I haven't mentioned him to Nark yet; then they might be permanently stained that color.
Kole didn't bother to answer my question. Instead she got out her backpack and pulled out something for me. "You left these at my house," she told me. I opened the bag and saw that they were my cubic zirconia stud earrings, the ones that I often wore. I would be missing those soon.
"Thanks," I mumble as I take them from her and stick them in my bag. Kole doesn't say anything to me for a while, but then she smiles at me in that special way of hers, and I almost groan. Things aren't going to go well for me when she smiles like that, I just know it.
"So you're totally coming to the football game with me on Friday. Kay? Kay," she says this very fast, and like a valley girl to boot, which she knows gets on my nerves. Then bell rings, which saves her from my sharp and sarcastic retort. Darn. And it was a good one too, something to do with drowning myself under water.
For a minute I want to run away. I don't want to talk to Garth, I don't want to go to class, and I don't want to be myself anymore. I want to run far enough away, far enough that people don't know who I am and I can pretend to be someone, anyone, other than Tara Markov.
I loathe the fact that to save myself from an uncomfortable conversation I'm willing to run away from my whole life and never look back. So I grit my teeth and force myself to put one foot in front of the other the whole way to that wretched class room.
Maybe he won't sit next to me today.
Who am I kidding? I'm never that lucky.
..O..
I'm the last one to walk in the classroom, of course, and there's only one desk open, the one in between the wall... and Garth. I clutch my binder so tight that the plastic edge of it leaves red marks on my hands,.
But then I remind myself that I'm Tara Markov, so why did I care about a boy, even one that had been my best friend in the whole wide world and the one person that I really missed before he had showed me that he had totally abandoned me, just like everyone else.
I didn't care. I never cared. I was just this huge noncaring person that hated everybody. Especially him. I glided into my seat and made sure that my hair covered my face so he couldn't see it. It was forever doing that, getting in my face and over my eyes and once upon a time I had used clips, my favorite being in the shape of a butterfly. But I didn't use it anymore, because I've grown up now.
Slowly and methodically I open my backpack and pull out my spiral before turning it to a clean page. I then pull out the pen that I had out of my pocket and place it nice and neat on my desk. We have a sub which means no learning. Which also means that we can talk for a whole forty five minutes.
If there is a God he would take mercy on me and just strike me down right here and now. Obviously there isn't one.
The whole time Garth hasn't tried to speak to me, hasn't really even looked my way.
"Hello Terra." Ah, here we go. I'm not worried though, not really. I'll be able to repell him, just like I do everyone else, and he'll be running from me screaming.
He's looking at me, a slight smile on his face, looking so formal- like an old man. He was wearing a sweater and jeans, his hair combed back and his face clear. I remember even when we were younger he was like that- he hardly ever got dirty and his hair was always neat. He was quiet too, I remember that. Quite the opposite of how I used to be. He and I seemed to balance one another out, I kept him from drowning and he kept me from drifting too far away. Or at least it used to be that way.
"It's Tara," I say shortly, hoping that he'll get the hint that I don't want to talk. That I just want him to go away and never think about me again. He'd done it well enough for ten years if the fact that I never saw him, not once, and he never contacted me. His mother could come and visit, but he was always just too busy.
That means that by the time he was fifteen he had grown out of me, that he didn't care. And that was fine because by the end of my fifteenth year I had grown out of him too. So long innocence also came to mean so long Garth.
I never thought that I would see him again, never thought that we'd be within ten feet of each other, close enough that if I wanted to I could reach my hand out and touch him arm. I wonder if he remembers all of those times in his backyard, back when I was a knight and he had been a king, back when I pretended that I could save other people. I had never gotten the hang of saving myself.
"What?" he asked me softly, shifting in his seat so that his whole body was facing me. I grabbed my pen and pretend that I could stake his heart with it, if only to keep me sane.
"My name isn't Terra anymore. It's Tara." I hoped that he would get the message. My name wasn't Terra and never would be again. That girl, the one he had known, was gone.
"Oh, okay." He was half smiling at me, as if what I just said was funny. I wanted to punch him in the jaw, to scream at him and to tell him to leave me the hell alone. As it was I felt my eye twitch and I turned away from him again. "So, Tara," his voice made me want to scratch at my skin. He was driving me crazy. "Why the sudden name change?"
Now it was my turn to smile, even though I didn't really think that his question was funny. If I told him the real story I would send him packing his bags so fast that he'd probably forget a few things; I send them to him with priority shipping.
I opened my mouth to tell him everything, but I found that I couldn't make myself; I really was that pathetic. I didn't want to see the disgust in his eyes, to hear the revulsion in his voice. For some reason I didn't want him to think badly of me, but I also didn't want him to confuse me with the vivacious little girl that I once had been.
So, like the liar that I am, I lied to him instead. "For the same reason that you breathe. Because I can." I had no idea why I was still talking to him. If this had been anyone else I would have been able to simply give them the cold shoulder or ignore them. If they had been anyone else I would have screamed at them awful things that would have made them leave me alone once and for all.
But Garth was different, and I hated the fact that he was. I couldn't bring myself to tear into my new best friend. That didn't mean anything, though. I knew the fact that if I had the chance I would be able to, but now when he wasn't doing anything to me? I didn't have the heart to do it.
"Oh." There was a pause and I thought that maybe he'd finally leave me alone. It's not as though I was being some sort of chatty Cathy over here. Garth was really making an effort to speak to me, because he was never one to talk just to hear the sound of his own voice. "How have you been?"
Abso-fucking-lutely fantastic. "What are you, forty five years old?" I snapped, growing tired of this game. Maybe I wasn't going to be a total bitch to him, but I'd be damned if I told him how I was doing, watching him pretend that he cared when I knew in reality he didn't give a shit.
At my outburst he gave me that half smile, the one that signaled to me that he was amused, again, which made me want to kick him again. "No," he answered, deciding to go the plain spoken route.
If I had to go through this every day I would just spare Garth the trouble and kill myself. It was that simple. "Stop talking to me," I finally responded harshly and a surprised look crossed Garth's face before he decided to look amused again.
"Okay," he answered, which made me grit my teeth.
I couldn't wait to get the hell away from him. Forever.
A/N: Yeah, this is a thousand years late and it's short. Forgive me, please, the next update should be faster (I hope) and the next chapter will be longer (I know). Not much has really happened yet, but they got to talk! Don't worry Garth'll be sticking around.
-RFE